Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story by Ryan K. Anderson (review)

For boys coming of age during turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, the most influential figure in their lives may have been a dime novel hero. So argues Ryan K. Anderson in Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood: The Progressive Era Creation of the Schoolboy Sports Story. Wholesome but no choirboy, confident but not haughty, good-looking, fearless, and trustworthy, Frank Merriwell graced the pages of Tip Top Weekly between 1896 and 1912 and lived on for years in magazines, paperbacks, and hardcover books. Both Merriwell's originator, Gilbert Patten, whose nom de plume was Burt L. Standish, and Tip Top's New York publisher, Street and Smith, benefitted from the boyhood hero's popularity. Likewise, Anderson suggests, adolescent readers benefitted by internalizing valuable lessons of manliness that Merriwell's accomplishments conveyed. The symbiotic relationship between cultural producer and consumer is a chief theme of Anderson's perceptive study.

Patten was not wholly responsible for imagining Frank Merriwell. As Anderson notes, there were literary antecedents, such as Jack Harkaway, the precocious youth created by Englishman Bracebridge Hemyng in the 1870s. Street and Smith President Ormond Smith also helped lay the groundwork, suggesting in 1895 that Patten, then an up-and-comer in the adolescent literature business, pen a new series that followed the exploits of a college youngster. Importantly, the protagonist was to be portrayed as having control over his own fate. How that exactly was to be done was left to Patten.

The premise was simple. Frank Merriwell was a student at Fardale Military Academy. In school, he competed in sports, acted responsibly, and converted enemies to friends. Afterward, he toured abroad, displaying the same manly characteristics that made him popular as a schoolboy. University days at Yale came next. As an Eli, he never shied away from a challenge; his ethics, humility, intelligence, and sports skills secured him numerous supporters. Later, he married, started a family, and founded the Merriwell American School of Athletic Development. In between, he learned he had "a long-lost younger half-brother Dick" (xxiii). No matter the situation, Merriwell always fared well. Winning in sports, particularly, taught him competitiveness. In Merriwell, Patten had perfected "the schoolboy sports story." Later authors—such as Clair Bee, in his beloved Chip Hilton books—drew upon the Merriwell archetype.

Examining the four main plotlines of the narrative—"the Yale spirit arc," "the love triangle arc," "the 'Reclamation of Dick Merriwell arc,'" and "the 'athletic school arc'"—Anderson analyzes Merriwell's impact on Tip Top's faithful readers, aka "Merry's flock." These devotees embraced Merriwell in part because his tale offered a roadmap to "civilized manhood," an important endpoint for well-to-do boys growing up in a period of turbulent change that many feared emasculated men. Before, simply having the "will" to better one's self was sufficient. But what was needed now was "willpower," the resoluteness to determine the trajectory of one's life, transforming "manly boys" into honorable men. According to Anderson, the ball fields and gymnasiums Merriwell frequented in Tip Top were seen as training grounds for respectable adulthood. Like sports, the America of Merriwell's day underscored achievement. The message was not lost on the young hero's fans.

Throughout the analysis Anderson smartly weaves discussions of related topics: a biography of Patten; background information on Street and Smith; and the rise and fall of the dime novel. The first section of the book—comprising some fifty pages—is devoted almost entirely to exploring these subjects. It is in the longer second section that Anderson addresses the meaning of Merriwell while explaining how Patten's personal life and the fickleness of the publishing trade influenced the direction of Merriwell's story. For example, Anderson suggests that Patten's strained marriage with his second wife, Mary...